Artifact Details

Title

Planar silicon transitors and diodes

Catalog Number

102762864

Type

Document

Description

Presented in October 1960 at the Electron Devices Meeting in Washinton, DC, Jean Hoerni's paper “Planar Silicon Diodes and Transistors” was one of the most frequently quoted semiconductor technology documents of the 1960's. It is a reprint of the paper published in 1961 as Fairchild Technical Paper TP-14. This was one of the first public presenations of the planar process. It was also published under the same title in the IRE Transactions on Electron Devices, Vol. 8, Mar. 1961, p. 178. Donated by John McDonald. 9 scanned pages.

Date

1960

Author

Hoerni, Jean A.

Biographical Notes

Born in Switzerland in 1924, Jean Amédée Hoerni earned Ph.D.s in physics at the Universities of Geneva and Cambridge. After moving to the U.S. he worked as a research fellow with Linus Pauling at the California Institute of Technology. He joined Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956 and left in September 1957 to co-found Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation with seven other dissidents. At Fairchild, Hoerni conceived the planar silicon transistor in December 1957 and successfully developed it in early 1959. His planar processing technique revolutionized semiconductor manufacturing and was adopted worldwide. It also led to the invention of the monolithic integrated circuit by R. Noyce at Fairchild. Hoerni left Fairchild with J. Last in early 1961 to found the Amelco divison of Teledyne, Inc., to manufacture integrated circuits. He left Teledyne in 1963 for Union Carbide, heading a research unit. In 1967 he established Intersil (short for International Silicon) with mainly European investors, producing MOS transistors and integrated circuits for calculators and watches. He founded several other companies, including Telmos to make high-voltage MOS devices. Hoerni received numerous industry awards. He is most widely known outside industry circles for his endowment of the Central Asia Institute to build schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. He died in 1997.

Publisher

Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation

Identifying Numbers

Other number doc-472a58a7b0f46 Deprecated ITCHP Number
Publication number TP-14

Extent

9 p.

Category

Technical Paper or Note

Collection Title

Information Technology Corporate Histories Collection

Publications

The author contributed to the following conference paper during his service at Fairchild:

Hoerni, J. A., Planar silicon diodes and transistors. 1960 International Electron Devices Meeting, vol. 6 (1960): 50.
Reprinted as Fairchild Semiconductor technical paper TP-14, (1961).

Lot Number

X7847.2017